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Movie Review | 'The Good Girl'

The Catcher in the Texas Chain Store

By ELVIS MITCHELL

Published: August 7, 2002

Even the title of the new Miguel Arteta crooked comedy of manners, "The Good Girl," is contrary and mocking. Like "Chuck and Buck," this director's previous collaboration with the writer Mike White, "Girl" is about a perverse need to create romance. Here it's like a Bette Davis melodrama directed by Luis Buñuel: ambition and heartache with a poisonous undercurrent of anti-bourgeois absurdity. And it's a winner, helped along by a no-frills performance by Jennifer Aniston as the soul-sick cashier Justine.

Justine spends her dreary days at Retail Rodeo, a down-at-the-heels Texas version of stores like Target and Wal-Mart . Her co-workers include a thoughtless, proud manager (John Caroll Lynch), a bullying born-again security guard (Mr. White) and Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), who makes sour, deadpan attacks on the inane day-to-day routine of the store's public address system.

When Justine stares into the big, droopy eyes of Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a new employee who wears his voluble, depressive air like the Red Badge of Courage, she's enchanted. In his early 20's and still living at home, Holden is smitten by Justine's worldliness, even though when he tells her he was named after the protagonist of "The Catcher in the Rye," she asks if his name is Catcher. (It's one in a series of running riffs on the character's name that "The Good Girl" supplies.)

Despite this episode, "The Good Girl," which opens today in Manhattan and Los Angeles, doesn't condescend. Justine's own life is treated like that of a J. D. Salinger character — or maybe more like Emma Bovary's. Now 30, she's mired in her job and in a marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly), an amiable stoner and house painter whose initiative was long ago suffocated in clouds of weed smoke. (Apparently, so was his ability to father children.) Most of the time he sits and blazes joints with his pal Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). So when Justine begins an affair with Holden, whose pliable lower lip fills her ears with his literary pretensions to suffering, she's at first fulfilled. But eventually she becomes as much Holden's mom as she is Phil's, even though she embarked on the relationship with Holden to give her life a new charge.

It's Ms. Aniston who surprises in "The Good Girl." In some ways she may feel as trapped as Justine by playing Rachel Green, the poor little rich daddy's girl of television's "Friends." She comes up with an inventively morose physicality for Justine: her arms hang at her sides as though shackled; they're not limp appendages but weighed down with unhappiness. The plucky dream girls she's played in movies like the underseen 1999 classic "Office Space" are expressive and given to anxious displays of hand waving. But here she articulates Justine's sad tales through a narration that's as affected and misery laden as Holden's ragged, ripped-off fiction.

This tone extends to her voice-over, which is sodden and exhausted, as if she is unable to rouse herself from the torpor within her head. Ms. Aniston provides a gentle, thoughtful performance, just as last season in "Friends" she gave Rachel a thorny, hard-won maturity and did her best work on the show; it's been a very good year for her.

And for Mr. Arteta, Ms. Aniston's comic authority is a sure laugh-getter. The persuasive results are a ripe, daffy comedy about the turbulent mixture of depression and jealousy. The director and writer don't judge their characters; rather they show how difficult it is to maintain morality, and that the actions of needy people set in motion a capricious fate that damages everyone.

Mr. Arteta is more than lucky in assembling an able-bodied cast, and his comfort with actors has grown. With "Chuck" and his previous "Star Maps," he focused more on the ideas behind the scripts; in "The Good Girl," he works out the emotional life of the material. The sum total is far more satisfying and tougher to shake off.

Ms. Deschanel, who alone is one of the best reasons to go to the movies these days, takes her few lines and sprinkles them through her scenes like fairy dust. This makes sense, because she's intensely pixilated — a devil doll with a hunger for mischief. She's like a stand-in for Mr. Arteta and Mr. White.

There's great support, too, from the always solid Mr. Reilly and Mr. Gyllenhaal, who's become a specialist in sending up infantile narcissism. He satirizes the spaniel-eyed sensitivity that other actors would exploit. And Mr. Nelson is both sprightly and rueful; he gets a lot out of his honeyed yokel's voice.

There's more to everyone here than we're initially led to think. "The Good Girl" is like a neurotically charged post-millennial take on the trailer-park comedies that Jonathan Demme once claimed for himself. Mr. Arteta has shown the American ability to create a family from the most unlikely material and in the oddest of situations. These makeshift cocoons — the Retail Rodeo, despite its crushing banality, is probably the only thing that gets Justine up in the morning — don't buy his protagonists peace. They're still outsiders.

"The Good Girl" flirts with a happy ending, but it's only a tease. There's still blood dripping from the smiley face.

"The Good Girl" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for strong language, sexuality and an acre of weed jokes.

THE GOOD GIRL

Directed by Miguel Arteta; written by Mike White; director of photography, Enrique Chediak; edited by Jeff Betancourt; music by Joey Waronker, Tony Maxwell, James O'Brien and Mark Orton; production designer, Daniel Bradford; produced by Matthew Greenfield; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 93 minutes. This film is rated R.